In what some call the “Information Age,” information and information systems have paramount importance. Information is now available in staggering amounts on just about any topic. Some see the world moving into a “Symbiotic Age” in which information systems integrate much more closely with human users to make information not only available, but also readily and easily accessible.
John Smart describes this transition as follows:                Of all the computational changes we can realistically forsee for the next 20 years, the conversational user interface, CUI, or “cooey,” is very likely to be without parallel in its effect on the average human being. When a cheap, ubiquitous CUI and its high bandwidth network and simulation infrastructure arrives (2015? 2020? 2030?, the choice may largely be ours to determine), it will move us out of the Information Age into a fundamentally new era, one that has been called the Symbiotic Age by a some futurists. This will be a time when all human beings on our planet, including the currently disenfranchised, functionally illiterate, and marginalized “bottom three billion,” will be able to converse meaningfully with ubiquitous and semi-intelligent technological systems, and use them daily to solve a vast range of computationally trivial but very real human problems.        
Mathematician and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge described a similar shift in technological focus from artificial intelligence (AI) to “the Singularity” at his 1993 address at NASA's VISION-21 Symposium:                When people speak of creating superhumanly intelligent beings, they are usually imagining an AI project. But there are other paths to superhumanity. Computer networks and human-computer interfaces seem more mundane than AI, and yet they could lead to the Singularity. I call this contrasting approach Intelligence Amplification (IA). IA is something that is proceeding very naturally, in most cases not even recognized by its developers for what it is. But every time our ability to access information and to communicate it to others is improved, in some sense we have achieved an increase over natural intelligence. And it's very likely that IA is a much easier road to the achievement of superhumanity than pure AI. In humans, the hardest development problems have already been solved. Building up from within ourselves ought to be easier than figuring out first what we really are and then building machines that are all of that.        
Accordingly, significant improvement in the ability to access information and to make such information accessible to others is highly desirable.